Salespeople resist change more than almost any other group in an organization. They are incentivized for results, rewarded for consistency, and protective of whatever combination of behaviors got them to where they are. A leader who walks in and mandates a new direction without understanding that dynamic does not get a transformed team. They get a team that nods in meetings and row in a different direction everywhere else.
Joshua David Farley, a chief revenue officer (CRO) with a track record of scaling North American sales organizations through turnarounds, technology transitions, and go-to-market (GTM) transformations, has developed a methodology for leading change that begins before he ever speaks to the sales team itself. “The key is getting everyone on your side,” Farley notes. “Think about a rowboat. If your loudest skeptics are rowing in the opposite direction, it slows everything down. And those loudest skeptics are often your top performers.”
Start Outside the Sales Team
Farley’s first move when stepping into a sales transformation is an outside-in audit. Before engaging the sales team directly, he interviews leaders across every business unit the team serves, regional, branch, and administrative leadership, as well as sales managers. The goal is to build a complete picture of what is working and what is not from every angle before arriving at any conclusions of his own. This sequence is deliberate. Leaders who skip it tend to arrive with a diagnosis shaped entirely by their own experience and miss the dynamics that only adjacent functions can see. By the time Farley reaches the sales team, he already understands how the broader organization perceives their performance, and he is positioned to ask better questions as a result.
The individual conversations that follow with sales team members are not performance reviews. They are genuine inquiries into what each person believes is working, what they would change, and how they think the team could better serve its customer base. “Getting salespeople and managers aligned with a vision is a sales skill in itself,” Farley reflects. “It requires listening, analysis, and buy-in building, not top-down enforcement.”
Motion Is Not Progress
Once a change initiative is underway, the most dangerous assumption a leader can make is that visible activity equals real movement. Farley is direct about this trap. Just because people are showing up and doing things does not mean the objective is being advanced. “Just because someone shows up at a construction site doesn’t mean the house is being built,” he points out.
His remedy is structured accountability built into the change plan from the outset. A 90-day framework, or shorter intervals where needed, with clearly defined KPIs at each milestone, removes ambiguity about whether progress is real or performative. Every step of a GTM plan should have a corresponding measurable movement tied back to the overall vision. Accountability applies to the leader as much as to the team. Leaders who exempt themselves from the same standards they hold others to undermine the credibility of the entire initiative.
Adaptability Is the Only Skill That Will Survive What Is Coming
The sales process has already changed more since COVID than in the previous two decades combined. The traditional approach of door-knocking, navigating gatekeepers, and manual outreach is close to obsolete. The leaders and salespeople who remain attached to those methods are not preserving what worked, they are accumulating a disadvantage that will become irreversible.
Farley’s projection for the next decade is specific. Salespeople will have immediate, deep intelligence about prospects through AI and algorithmic tools, eliminating the manual research that currently consumes significant selling time. Technology will handle prospect identification, follow-up, and outreach sequences that still require human input today. The shift will not be from salespeople chasing customers to salespeople being replaced; human judgment and genuine interpersonal understanding remain difficult to replicate. The shift will be from salespeople chasing customers to customers being drawn in through intelligent, algorithm-driven systems. “The ones who don’t embrace technology within the next 10 years won’t have a job,” Farley states plainly. “The sales process will be unrecognizable.”
Follow Joshua David Farley on LinkedIn for more insights on sales leadership, GTM strategy, and building revenue teams that perform through change.
